I'm a financial journalist and author with experience as a lawyer, speaker and entrepreneur. As a senior editor at Forbes, I have covered the broad range of topics that affect boomers as they approach retirement age. That means everything from financial strategies and investment scams to working and living better as we get older. My most recent book is Estate Planning Smarts -- a guide for baby boomers and their parents. If you have story ideas or tips, please e-mail me at: deborah [at] estateplanningsmarts [dot] com. You can also follow me on Twitter

Fall used to mean new classes, new ideas, new friends and challenges, and a chance to reset your expectations of yourself. At work, there’s no seasonal cycle. You no longer have that exciting sense of freedom, and your time is no longer your own.

The transition to full-time work is tough for many people. Generational stereotyping doesn’t help. Whatever generation you are from, surviving the transition to a first real job requires some major shifts in thinking. Here are the four most important ones, along with suggested career strategies.

1. It’s not about you anymore. In college, your job is to increase your knowledge and skills. “You are special,” is the message you hear over and over. But now, you aren’t quite so special. It’s back to being the low person on the totem pole.

At work, the focus is on the purpose of the organization that you just joined – not on you and your skills. What the organization wants and needs determines what you do.

Recent graduates reveal their misunderstanding by telling interviewers, “I want to work here because it is a place where I can learn and grow and advance.” That’s naïvely thinking about an employer as if it were a college. Instead focus on what you want to contribute to the organization’s success. From the employer’s standpoint, your learning and growth is just a byproduct of their success.

Strategy: Determine what the objectives of your organization are, and help the organization achieve them, while improving your skills and knowledge.

2. You need to keep the customer satisfied. Students are the customers of colleges and universities. The competition for their tuition dollars has intensified as enrollment has declined. Colleges are treating students as valued customers by increasing student perks like new dorms and athletic facilities.

At work, you aren’t the customer. The organization, your boss, your colleagues and other departments are all your customers, along with any external customers you may be serving. And like all customers, some internal customers are demanding; some are wonderful; some are clueless. You need to treat all of them with the same degree of professionalism.

Having “internal customers” can be a new experience, even for those who worked in restaurants during school. Internal customers have a profound impact on your career. They influence how you are viewed by the people above you. In college, you could complain about a professor without that impacting your grade in the next course. At work, complaining about your boss, your colleagues, or senior management can get you a negative reputation no matter how strong your performance is.

Strategy: Act professional, and don’t get caught up in gripe sessions or associate with people who complain.

3. Feedback isn’t automatic. In college,you generally know where you stand with your professors. You get some kind of feedback after every major paper, presentation, or exam, measured by a professor’s somewhat consistent standards.

To get an excellent rating at work is a lot harder and requires a lot more experience and effort than getting an “A” in a course at college. It involves doing more that what is expected of you on the job.

The lack of regular, ongoing, detailed feedback is another hard part of the transition. Many managers don’t take the time to critique each project or assignment. More often, they say something vague like, ”Good job,” and hand out a new one. That leaves many recent grads unsure of how they are doing.

Strategy: Ask for feedback.Appropriate times are at the completion of an assignment or before tackling a new one. For instance, you can ask your boss, “What could I have done differently during that project?” Or “What would make this an even better report?” Another possibility: ask a colleague for help, for example by saying, “I’m going to make a presentation in our department meeting. Would you please listen to it and tell me what I could do to make it better next time?”

4. You won’t always get a trophy. In an academic environment, you own your ideas. Claiming someone else’s idea or words as your own could get you in big trouble. Although collaboration is becoming more common in college, it’s still not the norm.

In contrast, at work all the ideas, inventions, or words you come up with are legally the property of your employer. (See “Ten Things Your Boss Doesn’t Want You To Know.”) So, there is less incentive to give you credit for your work.

While the best managers are willing to give credit where it is due, things don’t always work that way. In organizations, most work is a team effort and members of that team share the credit.

Strategy: To become respected and influential, contribute freely to your team. Offer your best ideas without asking for credit. You will build a reputation for your talent, whether it is writing well or being adept with spreadsheets. In time, people will become aware of your expertise and come to you for help. The most famous and respected consultants give away ideas to their clients all the time – and get paid handsomely for it.

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As an employer who sometimes hires young recent college graduates, I find this article to be powerful and “spot-on.” That being said though, it is sometimes valuable to help these young adults make the transition to the “real world” by giving them feedback on an interim basis. It is very helpful and in the long run, I think, it helps them to be better employees.

As a mother of two young adults, this is an excellent piece to share with them.

This article is really horrendous. As a “20-something” I find this extremely degrading, do you think every single Gen Y is living under a rock? I have noticed more and more of these articles bashing my generation. Why? Do you have some personal crusade? Do you forget when your parent’s generation didn’t approve of your “hippie” years? Perhaps someone should write an article on how Baby Boomers aren’t a generation to take seriously in the workforce? Or how about their track record that shows they will leave a world that is in a far worse state than in which they entered?

I totally agree, Robert. Especially in today’s quick-paced workplace, feedback sometimes goes by the wayside, as Hillary notes above. We should all remind ourselves to treat others the way we would like to be treated.

Great article! All points highlighted are important but I feel that keeping your customers satisfied is a real driver at work; the ability to network and build those relationships that can help you deliver your goals.

One point that could have been added to customer satisfaction is prioritizing your customers, I think fresh grads struggle with that at first as well and it takes several bad experiences to learn their lessons! I know I have!

Great article, and I really agree – Gen X has a problem with its attitude to work. Or work has a problem with its attitudes to Generation X. That may be a generalisation, but most big companies experience a different take on work and subordination from grads, because they have been raised to believe they’re special, that success can be there’s if they believe, and that they can do anything they want to.

Whilst there are very hard working and very clever examples of Generation X, the new young members of our workforce are statistically the most narcissistic and the most likely to find working under authority or being managed difficult. Many go off on their own routes, which in my view is a great thing to do, as long as you have direction and are dedicated. In the workplace, especially the corporate workplace others may well struggle, for now at least.

But is this really a bad thing? Yes things are changing and young people are now less willing to work for others, or in the way others want them, but maybe that’s part of the process of innovation as well. Change happens all the time, and I wonder how this will change things..

Thanks so much for sharing, Nick. It’s not just those who have full-time jobs who must work “under authority,” but also self-employed people who need to serve multiple clients. See my post, “How To Make Money Without A Job.”